Though it is a slightly awkward and unusual meeting, she is soon a welcome guest in the home of Elizabeth and James Burton. Almost everyone she knows is instantly killed, including Konrad, and the design of three black cranes on the rear of her kimono are burned into her back, scarring her for life.Ī little less than two years later, Hiroko decides to travel to Delhi, India, to seek out Konrad’s half-sister Elizabeth. One day, as she enjoys a moment of contentment in her apartment, wearing her mother’s luxurious kimono, everything changes in an instant as an atomic bomb drops on Nagasaki. Where once she could associate with her German lover, Konrad, more or less openly, they must now be discrete following Germany’s defeat as he is now viewed with suspicion. Where once she had worked as a school teacher, she has been dismissed from her job because her father was outspoken against the war, and must now spend her days in a munitions factory. As a young woman in Japan during WWII, she saw the impact on her own life of the rapid change in Japan’s war fortunes. Hiroko Tanaka has had the misfortune of experiencing the pain of some of the twentieth century’s most horrific man-made tragedies. Still, it manages to carry this ambition with a style that is fluid and elusive and plot that builds in tension while the reader fears for the characters’ fate.
As you can imagine, tragedy in this story cannot be avoided.
It’s narrative moves with its characters from war time Japan, to pre-Partition India, to Pakistan during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to New York after September 11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan.
Burnt Shadows is an immensely ambitious novel by Kamila Shamsie.
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